Rams Eye The Track Guy

It's finally time to welcome the brand new 2020 mid-engine Corvette C8.R race car. I'd say this is the most hotly anticipated race car to debut since the current Ford GT, but Ford surprised the world with the GT so there wasn't a whole lot of anticipation. This may be the most hotly anticipated new race car ever in quite a while, much like its street going mid-engine sister.

It's the first clean sheet design in about 20 years, Chevy says, since the 1999 C5.R and will race for the first time ever at the 2020 Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona. Chevy says there is a deeper connection and technology transfer between the C8.R racing version and the road-going C8, and the highest percentage of shared parts of any Corvette generation before.


In fact, the C8.R utilizes the production chassis built right alongside the other chassis meant for street duty in the Bowling Green Assembly plant that builds the street version. As expected, there are some modifications to meet race requiremen…

If you aren't at all into gaming and online championships - eSports - you may not know who Sadokist is. In fact, I had no idea who he was when I met him either.  I just saw a "new" E46 M3 GT3 race car at the track that I had never seen before. I'm not exactly a "veteran" of our track - I had only been frequenting the track for about 5 years at the time - but it had been long enough that I recognized most of the regulars and the race cars. It looked like a proper build and the trailer was parked next to the other two local M3 race cars running whose owners I knew very well, so I went to chat and ask about the car.


I learned later that Matt is a bit of an eSports celebrity. You can't argue with Twitter. But you wouldn't know this just talking to him. He's very down to earth, so much so that he simply thanked me when I "welcomed" him to the track... even though he went to his race school as a wee lad 4 years before I even first stepped f…

At its first ever visit to Sebring International Raceway for the World Endurance Championship (WEC) 1000 Miles of Sebring, Toyota Gazoo Racing (GR) set a new lap record on Test Day #1. Mike Conway in the #7 TS050 Hybrid LM P1 car had a best lap time of 1:41.211. Like Brabham's BT62 Bathurst lap record a few weeks ago, the lap time is unofficial because it wasn't set during a competitive session, but it is a verified clocked time. But this is a test session for the WEC 1000 Miles of Sebring so this is likely in race spec unlike the Brabham's BT62 lap time that was set during demonstration laps. Porsche's LM P1 car, the 919 Hybrid, famously obliterated the Nurburgring lap record last summer in 2018 with a lap time of 5:19.55.

Before the test, Mike Conway said: "Going into Sebring my expectations are high. We would like to keep up the good run of form we have had in #7, which means continuing to score well and win more races. Sebring is going to be a challenging one…

I appreciate the entire spectrum of car motorsports; the state-of-the-art and sophisticated F1 side and the horsepower crazed, high speed 200 mph madness of NASCAR, along with everything else in between. But nothing - absolutely nothing - gets me more excited in motorsports than a race car that's closely tied to a production, road-going version. And that's why I LOVE a lot of factory turn-key race cars like the 911 GT2 RS Clubsport.

The 911 (991.2) GT2 RS Clubsport was built to meet SRO Motorsport Group's new GT2 racing series. SRO is a company specializing in the promotion and organisation of motorsport series. They mainly focus on GT racing, with some of the series they promote include the Blancpain GT Series, GT4 European Series, and others. It recently acquired the GT2 trademark and announced last year the new GT2 series. The class is intended to offer a new opportunity to amateur racing (assuming you have a lot of funds) and feature ‘true supercars’ with horsepower r…

The dominance of the Williams FW14B is undeniable, even if the tech may be called into question. It took Nigel Mansell to his first (and only) F1 world title in 1992, the first time a British had won it since 1976. It qualified on a pole position 7 times out of its 13 races. And despite facing off against Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher, it set the record of 9 Grand Prix wins in a single season.

To this day, the car remains one of the most advanced F1 cars of all time due to rule changes in 1994 that banned a lot of the technology. It came with a semi automatic gearbox (which was just starting to take over), traction control, and active load-leveling hydraulic suspension. To allow all of this to work properly with the required fail-safes, Williams ended up having to come up with their own controller and their own programming.

The hydraulic load leveling suspension was initially meant to be an all mechanical system so it was a complete transformation in controls. And in an age whe…

It wasn't long ago that Brabham announced that it was returning to competition with the BT62 to compete at the World Endurance Championship (WEC) and Le Mans. They also announced that they will be building a road-legal version of their mighty BT62, likely to qualify for the GTE class requirements so it can compete at Le Mans. Capitalizing on that, Brabham was planning on taking a BT62 for demonstration laps in the build-up to the Liqui-Moly Bathurst 12 Hour race that's running this weekend, but they gave the people a lot more than a few hot laps.

With minimal testing on Thursday and with just four laps on Saturday, conditions were good so the BT62 test driver Luke Youlden went for a flying lap. That flying lap set a new track record of 1:58.67. The lap time is a verified clocked time, but it is labeled "unofficial" because it wasn't set during a competitive session. The previous lap record was 1:59.29, set by an unrestricted Audi R8 GT3 race car last year in tes…